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This is a blog by the students at the S P Jain Center of Management, Dubai, Singapore. The site is designed to play a common ground for the students and alumni of SPJCM to blog about their lives at the campus, industry exposure, events, current happenings, and everything else. The views expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of S P Jain Center of Management. For more information on S P Jain Center of Management and the courses offered, visit the official SPJCM website

Friday, January 15, 2010

Pavan ShindeGlobal Human Resources ManagementGMBA - April'09

A tale of misadventure in a strange marriage

Change of heart : google.cn

Google was mesmerised by China’s rapidly expanding internet market. This was well over 4 years ago. But China, till then, had kept Google at arm’s length by intermittently blocking Google.com and making even that intermittent access snail slow. Baidu wooed and dominated the Chinese market, laughing (at Google) on its way to the bank. Google courted China with a pruned and ‘more decent’ version of its search engine. Apparently, it must have thought to itself that better something than nothing at all. Throwing caution to the wind, it set forth to milk the Chinese cow.

The elders met, the horoscopes were matched and the marriage was fixed. Was it meant to last? Or was it just mAdSense? Google penetrated the Chinese search engine market with a view of being the leading search engine in China in the long haul. Now, it announces its threat to review the future of the relationship and possibly pull out of the Chinese search engine market. It has cited infection by the plague of hackers and woes of the ‘finger-on-the-lip’ policy to have agonised it. Even Uncle (Sam) Obama had obliquely deplored the Comstockery, when he toured the country in November. But China wouldn’t listen. Eventually pushing Google to separate the master bed, or maybe even, leave the bedroom for good.

China made a huge hue and cry about violations of copyrights in its Google Books venture

China is also said to have made “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” on its corporate computer systems “originating from China” in December.

But Google isn’t the only one in the sorrow-ship

China pretended to open its arms to these sites in the build-up to the Beijing Olympics in August 2008 as it tried to project a more open and liberal image to foreign delegates and visitors. But no sooner did the lights go off at the stadium, that restrictions have been amplified to unprecedented levels

China has prevented the masses from any access to the world wide web, forget any access to uncensored news, in the regions afflicted by ethnic disturbances.

China met Twitter and Facebook with the same cold hostility.

China wouldn’t hear a word against itself and proceeded to block leading international newspapers such as the Guardian, the New York Times, even the Economist, for days at length.

Google would perhaps be among the first of the big brands and heavy weights to openly attribute its withdrawal to the lack of freedom of expression. While Silicon valley praises Google for taking some guts to make such bold statements, the White House pats Google’s back assuring its (Washington’s) support. Even if standing up against China is part of its long-term interests, there is no discounting the fact that Google has ‘the balls’ to walk away from the world’s largest potential market.

A broken family?

We must remember, though, that such direct finger-pointing isn’t going to do down very well with China. Even while it buries news articles about Google’s threat, it seeks to portray the entire event as a hollow gimmick and a narrow commercial dispute rather than a pressing political one. It even shies away from taking Google’s name directly reminiscent of rural Indian women refusing to take their husband’s name.

What about the future?

Will about the 700 or so people whose families earn their daily bread because of Google?

Will the backlash lead China to impose a Great Wall on all Google services and block it in its entirety?

What about the sale of Google’s merchandise?

What about the Google android and its younger sibling that is still in the womb?

Will they do well in the renminbi markets?

In all probability, the Beijing may not vent the fire of their anger directly on Google because of increasing public sentiment of sympathy among the Chinese netizens for Google’s spasm on censorship, among other reasons. Beinjing may instead choose to turn the fire elsewhere by stirring up a little nationalist and (the suppressed) anti-American sentiment on another front (Taiwan?).

Friday, January 8, 2010

The first decade of the 21st century has just passed and we’re entering into a new decade with lots of hopes in our heart. We, at SPJCM often wonder at how quickly the past 8 months in this course have just cruised by. But when we come to think of it, it is even more amazing to see how quickly the past decade has flown by. For many of us, at a personal level, this has been a decade of change. At the dawn of this millennium, most of us were either in our prime or late teens. How far have we travelled from there?! We’ve finished our Undergraduate studies and found ourselves a job; some travelled to various countries; some got married; and at the end of the decade, here we are, back at school :)

The world has also witnessed a lot of new things – some good and some bad. In some cases, the pace of change has been dramatic and changed millions of lives forever. We, at the blogger’s club entered into a discussion about the important events that marked the previous decade. In this post, we present a set of events that flashed in our minds.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Pavan ShindeGlobal Human Resources ManagementGMBA - April'09

The fall of Dubai World

With the Sheikhs of Abu Dhabhi allowing Dubai to slip and Emirates Airlines on the line, one can only guesstimate what the repercussions will be on the GCC. To some extent, I think the property debacle was imminent. Not only because Dubai’s property market has been built on sand and dry oil wells, but also because of the sentiments in the world markets. While Dubai was looking up at the 200 storeys of Burj Dubai (the tallest man-made structure ever built ), the man-made wonders of the Palm Jumeirah and the Dubai Waterfront; the world was looking at Dubai in silent speculation. I think sentiments are like self-fulfilling prophecies; if you think that the market will collapse, it most certainly does! Personally, it’s untimely as it might affect my prospects of finding myself a suitable job opportunity when I graduate in March. Nonetheless, I’m staying optimistic, hoping that sentiments can indeed turn the world around!

Friday, December 18, 2009

Arun Sharma

Investment Banking and Wealth Management

GMBA - April 09

On one side where strategy is usually understood as a plan of action to achieve specific goals, philanthropy essentially is a symbol of giving, possibly to charity. But these days, there is a buzz in the corporate world, besides Copenhagen. And the new buzzword is Strategic Philanthropy. While Milton Friedman insisted decades ago that the only purpose of existence of the companies is to generate profits for its shareholders, the socially conscious global citizens of 21st century are ready to turn that statement up on its head. In the present times, the shareholders are considered nothing but gamblers in the market whose expectations, if turned into corporate strategy, will translate into Only Profit, Full Stop. But it is good to see that the social awareness is increasingly becoming popular in the corporate sector.

The wall clock in our class displays 7:10 pm. I look around the classroom and notice at least 10 hands popping up in the air – students eagerly trying to put forth their points of view or ask questions on the topic being discussed in class. Today we are discussing the online strategies of Skype and SPH – South East Asia’s leading media brand. This was supposed to be a 3-hour session and should have come to an end by 5:30 pm. The class has been going on for almost 5 hours now!!!

Is this the same class where students often complain having to sit through just the stipulated duration of the classes? No one in the class (including me) seems to be in a mood to end the session. I’m amazed at the interest and the enthusiasm displayed by the students today.

'iCradle' - is a business plan presented by us, in the e-Business course of our GMBA program. The idea came from what we see around and from our own experiences. In a country like India, there are a huge number of aspiring entrepreuners who do not have the opportunity to implement their innovative ideas and build new business ventures. Our idea of 'iCradle' aims to address this problem by bringing entrepreuners closer to venture capitalists and corporates who can fund their ideas.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Vijay VaidyanathanInformation Technology Management
GMBA - April 09

The Leadership club of SPJCM has done it once again – organized a very successful blood donation camp in our Singapore campus on 02 Dec, 2009. The Leadership club under the guidance of Mr. Thaneer Lakshmanan, our academic manager has done an excellent job of canvassing for the event among the students. They sent repeated mailers, put up posters in prominent places, conducted explanatory sessions on blood donations encouraging people to come forward and donate blood. The students responded by turning out in great numbers. The target for the day was to collect 40 units of blood. We ended up collecting 56 units of blood despite many people being rejected due to failure to meet criteria like expected hemoglobin count etc.

We thank Mr. Thanneer and the leadership club for taking the initiative to organize such an event and help us take part in a noble cause. We are looking forward to many more events like this in future.